Re: Re[2]: Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard

[David Chisnall]

Hi Manuel,

I think Thom's comments are a little harsh, but I have to concur with  
the underlying idea behind them.  I am not exactly an Objective-C  
neophyte - around 20K lines of code in the Étoilé repository are my  
contribution and I have no problems digging through the -gui source to  
find why my code isn't working - but I have twice tried and failed to  
use GSWeb.

I don't mind the lack of a GUI WOBuilder clone.  I'm quite happy  
designing HTML templates by hand (in fact, I'd probably prefer to),  
but I can't without the slightest hint of documentation.  I have read  
the WO and GSW class documentation, but it doesn't really make sense  
without some kind of overview and I can't apply the WO documentation  
to GSW because the build and deployment environments are too different.

With GNUstep, I can come from the Cocoa documentation, read the  
GNUstep Make documentation, and immediately be able to produce command- 
line tools.  I can read a Gorm tutorial, and then easily map anything  
that the OS X tutorials say about IB and apply that to GNUstep.  Note  
that Gorm and GNUstep Make are the two parts of GNUstep that I  
consider the weakest, and yet they STILL compare favourably to GSW in  
terms of approachability.

I find GNUstepWeb to be a source of incredible amounts of  
frustration.  Looking at things like SOGO and other WebObjects  
applications make it seem so tantalising, and yet it is always  
slightly out of reach.  I don't have WebObjects 4.5 and I don't even  
have a way of getting hold of a copy.  Neither do many other people.   
If the only way of using GSW is to have prior experience with an 8- 
year-old piece of proprietary software that cost $699 on release then  
it probably already has all of the users it ever will and has no  
future other than to fade into obscurity which seems like a colossal  
waste.  If someone who knows GNUstepWeb well would just spend the two  
or three hours required to write an introductory tutorial, its  
usefulness would be increased dramatically.

I suggest any GSW developers read this:

http://www.shaffer-consulting.com/david/Seaside/

It's close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to good  
tutorials, but it was enough to pick up Seaside and start producing  
applications with it.  GSW doesn't even seem to have something of this  
quality.

David

On 23 Nov 2007, at 18:22, Thom Cherryhomes wrote:

> Manuel,
>
> Gee, your responses are one hell of a cop-out.
>
> What about for those of us who don't have an 8 year old copy of
> WebObjects 4.5 to start off with? tough shit?
>
> again, tools for your own little world, and I'm of the opinion that
> the code should just be removed from the GNUstep tree because of its
> sheer uselessness to everyone except a few who have tools that ARE NOT
> FREE SOFTWARE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
>
> -Thom